I Can Defend Him
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4
The plan was simple. The simplest plans are always the most dangerous because simple leaves no room for improvisation when things go wrong. Camika had accounted for this. She’d told Nora three days before they set it in motion that the plan needed one thing above everything else.
Speed.
Not cleverness. Not complexity. Speed. Because the moment Steven felt the trap close he would make a phone call. And the people on the other end of that phone call moved faster than courts and faster than federal agencies and considerably faster than an eight year old girl from Ten Pines.
So they had to move faster than Steven.
Camika had said this in the diner on a Wednesday over grilled cheese with her notebook open to the page she called the operational timeline, which was four pages of small neat handwriting covering every step from Sandra’s meeting with James Morton to the moment Joshua’s contact at the police department took Steven Biggs into custody. She had assigned time estimates to each step. She had identified the three points where things could go wrong and written contingencies for each one.
Then she’d closed the notebook, put it in her duct tape backpack, and gone home to do her homework.
Nora had sat in the booth for a long time after she left.
Monday morning. Sandra Chen arrived at Forbes Industries at her usual time, parked in her usual spot, took the elevator to the executive floor. She was wearing a charcoal blazer with a small enamel pin on the lapel that Patrick Foster had helped Joshua Hall install the previous evening. The pin contained a microphone sensitive enough to pick up a conversation through a closed door. It also contained a camera with a one hundred and thirty degree field of view.
Sandra knew about the microphone. She didn’t know about the camera. Camika had decided she would perform more naturally that way.
Nora had relayed this instruction to Joshua without attribution. Joshua had looked at her for a moment and then installed the camera without comment.
James Morton was in his office when Sandra knocked. Mid-thirties, brilliant with code, always slightly awkward in social situations. He’d been with the company for two years. Steven had brought him in personally. Sandra had always found him slightly too careful in the way people are careful when they’re managing information.
She understood that now.
“James,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I need your opinion on something sensitive.”
He gestured to the chair across from his desk. Sandra sat down and opened the folder she’d prepared, real evidence logs they’d assembled with Joshua’s help, and laid it on the desk between them.
She told him about the forensic analysis. The notation in the evidence logs. The request for secondary testing on the murder weapon, specifically transferred fingerprint detection, approved and scheduled and then quietly cancelled with no explanation and no record of who had cancelled it.
She watched his face while she talked.
James Morton was good. He was very good. But Sandra Chen had spent six years reading financial documents and the people who created them and she knew the specific quality of stillness that settles over a person when they hear something that terrifies them and are trying very hard not to show it.
She saw it. Lasting maybe two seconds. Then gone.
“That’s concerning,” he said carefully. “You should probably bring this to Steven.”
“I wanted your technical opinion first. Is it possible? Transferred fingerprints?”
“Theoretically,” James said. “But Sandra, pursuing this could open up questions we might not want answered. Liability exposure. More scrutiny on the company at exactly the wrong time.”
“What if it exonerates Malcom?”
Something moved behind his eyes. “Then his defense team would have found it already.”
Sandra gathered her folder. “You’re right. I’ll take it to Steven.”
She left.
In the hallway she kept her pace even and her expression neutral and her hands completely steady until she reached her own office and closed the door behind her. Then she sat down at her desk and looked at her hands for a moment.
They were shaking slightly.
She folded them together and waited.
Across the city in a borrowed office space Joshua Hall had set up three monitors showing feeds from four different cameras. The pin camera on Sandra’s lapel. Two cameras covering the entrances to the county evidence facility. One covering the parking lot outside.
Malcom Forbes sat in the corner watching the screens. He’d been out for six days. He still wasn’t sleeping properly. He’d told Sandra it felt like wearing borrowed clothes, this fragile conditional freedom with the ankle monitor pressing against his shin and the case still open and Steven Biggs still sitting in his office under the portrait that said Founder and CEO.
He watched Sandra’s feed. Watched her hands shaking. Watched her fold them together.
She was remarkable, he thought. She was absolutely remarkable.
His phone buzzed. A text from a number he didn’t recognize that turned out to be Patrick Foster relaying a message from Camika who was currently in third grade learning about the water cycle and could not have her phone out during class.
The message said: He’ll contact Steven within twenty minutes. Watch the evidence facility from minute fifteen.
Malcom showed it to Joshua.
Joshua looked at it. Looked at Malcom. Looked back at the screens. “She timed it from the meeting.”
“Yes,” Malcom said.
“She’s in school right now.”
“Yes.”
Joshua turned back to the monitors. “Twenty minutes,” he said.
It took fourteen.
The man who appeared on the evidence facility camera at 11:17 a.m. was not Steven Biggs. He was middle aged and professional looking and he carried a briefcase and moved with the particular confidence of someone accustomed to walking into rooms and being taken seriously.
Morris McDaniels. The prosecutor who’d been so certain of Malcom’s guilt. The prosecutor who’d grinned in the courtroom when a child stood up to say the evidence was wrong.
He presented a court order to the desk clerk. Judge Sanders’ signature. Authorization to examine the murder weapon for potential appeal purposes.
The clerk examined it. Frowned. Asked to verify with his supervisor.
McDaniels waited with his briefcase and his professional confidence and his forged document.
The clerk returned and told him to leave.
Joshua’s contact had already flagged the evidence log. The court order was fraudulent. Judge Sanders had issued no such authorization. The moment McDaniels walked through that door an alert had gone to three different people simultaneously — Joshua’s contact, the duty supervisor, and a federal investigator in the FBI’s Seattle field office who had been waiting for exactly this kind of move for six weeks.
McDaniels left. Walked to the parking lot. Made a phone call.
Joshua’s directional microphone caught every word.
By the time McDaniels finished the call Joshua had everything backed up to four separate locations and Nora had everything she needed for the story she’d been building for two months.
Malcom’s phone buzzed again. Patrick relaying Camika.
Water cycle lesson finished. What happened.
Malcom typed back. He took the bait. All of it.
Three minutes passed. Then: Good. Next phase. Sandra needs to get out of the building.
Malcom looked at Joshua. “She says Sandra needs to get out.”
Joshua was already reaching for his phone. “I know. I’ve been watching Steven’s office feed for the last twenty minutes.” He turned one of the monitors so Malcom could see it. “James went to Steven eleven minutes ago. They’ve been in there ever since. Sandra’s down the hall.”
“She doesn’t know—”
“I’m calling her now.”
But Sandra’s phone went straight to voicemail. Then again. Joshua tried the office landline. Nothing.
“Signal jammer,” Joshua said. “He’s activated it building wide.”
They looked at each other.
Then they looked at the monitor showing Steven’s office. The frosted glass. Two shapes moving inside. And then a third shape that had been near the window moving toward the center of the room.
Toward Sandra.
Malcom was already standing. “We have to go.”
“I know,” Joshua said, grabbing his keys.
Malcom’s phone buzzed one more time.
GO NOW.
The drive took twelve minutes. Malcom counted every one.
Joshua drove. Malcom sat in the passenger seat with his hands flat on his thighs the way he’d learned to sit in the jail cell when the walls felt like they were breathing. Steady. Even. Don’t let the panic make the decisions.
He thought about Sandra at her desk with shaking hands folding themselves together.
He drove faster.
They took the elevator to the executive floor. The hallway was quiet in the particular way of places where something is about to happen. Steven’s office at the far end. Door closed. Frosted glass with two shapes behind it that had stopped moving.
Then Sandra’s voice. Strained and tight but still fighting.
You think you can just intimidate me into silence? You think I’ll cover for you after what you’ve done?
And Steven’s voice. The voice Malcom had known for ten years. The voice he’d built something with. The voice that had laughed at his jokes and argued about product roadmaps and told him once at two in the morning over bad coffee that they were going to change the world.
That forensic analysis — if it happens, everything falls apart.
Malcom put his hand on the door.
Joshua grabbed his arm. Held up his phone. Still recording. Wait.
They stood in the hallway and listened to Steven Biggs confess.
All of it. Sasha’s allegations and what they would have cost him. The government contracts and what they were really for. Malcom’s ethics and how they’d become an obstacle he couldn’t negotiate around. The decision he’d made. The people he’d called. The professional who’d walked out the service entrance at 11:52 p.m. on March 14th with a job completed and a hundred dollar bill for the parking attendant who’d seen too much.
He heard Sandra’s voice break slightly when she said your best friend and Steven’s voice go cold when he said I secured our survival and he heard the moment when Steven’s voice dropped into something quiet and dangerous and said accidents happen Sandra and he heard Sandra go silent.
Joshua’s hand dropped from his arm.
Malcom opened the door.
Steven was reaching for the drawer when Malcom came through. His hand stopped when he saw who it was. A complicated thing moved across his face — shock, then calculation, then something that had no name because it was too many things at once. Relief maybe. Or the specific grief of a person who has been waiting without knowing it for the moment when running stops being possible.
Sandra was against the far wall. Pale. Defiant. Unbroken.
James Morton was in the corner chair with the face of a man who had understood for some time that this was coming and had spent that time hoping he was wrong.
Malcom looked at Steven. Ten years of a shared life between them. Late nights and impossible problems and the particular intimacy of building something from nothing with another person. He looked at his best friend standing in front of a drawer with a gun in it and felt the grief of it move through him like weather.
Then it passed.
We heard everything, he said. The confession. The threats. All of it. It’s over.